It had reached that verge of madness when it had called upon the negro for help to fight against the freedom which he so longed to find, for the bondage he would escape--against Lincoln the Emancipator for Davis the enslaver.
Douglass critiques the Confederacy's desperate and contradictory decision to consider enlisting enslaved Black men to fight for their own continued bondage.
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The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.
The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.
I believed I should get enough to eat at Covey’s, even if I suffered in other respects, and this to a hungry man is not a prospect to be regarded with indifference.